Bad or weak pieces of work should simply not be made. A well-designed movie shows what’s going on with the action, setting, and dialog—there’s no actual need for exposition in film.

But now that that’s been dropped by the wayside in favor of higher numbers (it takes less quality-control effort to shove 100 books through the chute in one month than to edit 10 books through the chute in the same amount of time), the quality of their books show it.

Like any other historical milestone, it always comes back to the same formula: increasing expertise among random practitioners eventually builds a citadel of professionals, until that citadel begins to feel smug and focus more on their own egos than on the expertise that made them. Then the amateurs storm the gates and take back the power. And the cycle starts all over again.

The reason why the FUD works is that it’s too-often true. I’ve thought that the reading public could crowd-source the winnowing of wheat from chaff. And I’ve expressed my opinions in longer form here/

Traditionally, we’ve relied on publishers for that screening, and publishers and readers both have relied on a tiny handful of prominent reviewers to screen available books into a small recommended minority: the New York Times, the LA Times, the Chicago Sun, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a few others.

Meanwhile, those readers who liked to read a whole lot of similar books quickly learned to rely on publishers’ genre categories. This is how Penguin revolutionized the reading masses through their dimestore paperbacks in the 1930s.

And now a similar tectonic shift is happening in publishing, with e-books and self-publishing.

We’re already seeing a rise in dependence upon book review blogs that cater to specific readerships. These reviewers are beginning to hold the power, screening the flood of books—traditionally published, e-books, and self-published—for their readers.

On the other end of the scale, independent editors are being brought into the picture to maintain and even raise the quality through this system, as it breaks free of traditional publishers and evolves into a radical new beast.

I have yet to download a self-published book to my Kindle that I wanted to keep reading past the first few pages. I *know* the quality is out there somewhere, but I don’t necessarily want to spend the time to find it. So publishers still serve a vital gate-keeping function for me. Not every published book grips my imagination, but the odds of finding a gem are much greater when I’m searching in a pre-screened pool.

I’m not down on self-publishing. As I said, the quality is out there. Maybe, in the new world of self-publishing, trusted book reviewers will take on the role of helping the rest of us find it.

You can use your gut to guide you about scenes—if you’re dreading it, there’s a reason. This is what Roz Morris calls yours “spider sense.” It looks like you were dreading this scene because it wasn’t going to be exciting, and you, just like your reader, only want exciting scenes. Now you know you can rely on your spider sense about future scenes, too.

Remember not to write toward your character’s Resolution. Only toward her Climax. You won’t know how her story is resolved until you’ve written the whole thing and learned everything you need to learn about who she is and what she’s going to choose when she’s finally backed against the wall. Your job until then is to back her against the wall with a vengeance. In this way you illuminate for your reader what we humans are really made of.